housing

“PredPol is a company that uses advanced machine learning algorithms to tell police departments where Black people live.”

Over and over, I keep backing my way into the same story: the places where marginalized people in America live repeatedly get the short end of the stick when it comes to, well, basically everything that can be distributed geographically.

I came to the conclusion that the most serious problem facing American public education was the concentration of the most disadvantaged young people in schools that became overwhelmed with the social and economic problems of their students.

If a child has asthma, that child is more likely to be up at night wheezing and then coming to school drowsy the next day. On average, a drowsy child is not going to achieve as well as a well-rested child. It makes a tiny difference, but then you add up all the disadvantages that children who are in low-income segregated neighborhoods come to school with—asthma, lead poisoning, homelessness, economic insecurity—you begin to explain the achievement gap.

The White homeowner bought a second home in the suburb and resold it to his African American friend. When the African American family moved in, an angry mob surrounded the home protected by the police. They dynamited the home, they firebombed it. And when the riot was all over, the White homeowner was arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed for 15 years for sedition. For having sold a home to a Black family.

This notion that it’s personal choice, that we like to live around people who look like us, that it happened by accident—when we believe that, we don’t believe there is anything we can do about it. We don’t believe we have a responsibility to do anything about it. Something that happens by accident can only un-happen by accident.

But if we really start to accept and understand the history, the true history like what’s outlined in “The Color of Law”—that it was intentional action by all levels of government and private actors who were incentivized or required by the government to create segregated communities—then we see we have a responsibility to remedy it.

In Charlottesville, we talk about one particular community where a restrictive racial covenant identified the bank and the real estate agency and the developer that cooperated with the federal government, which was subsidizing the development, that created this segregated community for White people only. The bank was absorbed by a larger bank; it’s now the Virginia National Bank.

Each of those three institutions still exists today. Those successors not only absorbed the financial liabilities of the real estate agency and the banks that they absorbed, respectively, but the moral responsibilities as well.

We can change the zoning in those communities to allow for a diversity of housing types—to allow duplexes, triplexes, small, multifamily buildings on the same lots that now only allow single-family homes.

A couple of examples are a community could start or support a land trust. A land trust creates affordable home ownership opportunities in communities where prices are rising or gentrifying. In suburban, expensive communities, they can create long-term, affordable home ownership opportunities for low- or moderate-income households and prevent displacement in gentrifying communities.